I never would have guessed that Panama City would be Condo-Land

Is a very very very fine casa. As of yesterday afternoon, Christine and I are moved into our new condo tower, in the neighborhood of El Cangrejo. Our realtor, Rosalind of Panama Signature Realty has been amazing; I toured it solo about a week ago, while Christine was at the USA Embassy for her introductory meetings, and Rosalind was right – it fit all the criteria we asked for. Only a 5 minute walk to the metro, fully furnished, a small but neat balcony overlooking the city, an incredibly large rooftop pool, and two nice bedrooms. Three bathrooms if you can believe it. Apparently it’s very common, even in “medium price” housing like this (that’s in comparison to the sort of thing most expats usually live in; I haven’t been around the area enough to know what Panamanians live in!) to have a “maid’s area” with a tiny area for a cot, and a little but full bathroom with sink, toilet, and shower. Only cold water, though, goes to it! Sadistic. It was the same at the condo of Christine’s coordinator, Rick, which is a 3 bedroom and 4.5 bathroom unit overlooking the ocean – only cold water for the maid’s area!

We camped here last night; the electricity only got connected this afternoon while I was out getting some food and ice to keep it on. Suddenly my phone goes off and when I hold it to my ear, it’s the security guard from our building. My spanish is still terrible but I manage to understand that the electricity guy has arrived, and he wants Christine’s phone number. Haha, I don’t know why he called me first, though – he has both our numbers and he knows I can barely speak any spanish. Needless to say, though, I grabbed a celebratory sixpack of the local beer, Balboa Roja, now that I knew we’d have a working fridge to keep it in.

Last night though, we stumbled around in the dark with Rick’s solar-charged camping lamp, trying to unpack our 4 massive, airplane-checked-luggage-limit bags just enough to get situated. The condo was a bit musty, but that’s par for the course here. We’ve heard that even food in sealed bags will get moldy here unless you keep your kitchen air conditioned 24/7. The bed’s sheets definitely need a washing, but of course that had to wait until we had electrical power to start the in-unit washer/dryer combo unit.

There was some mild growing pains that come from two midwesterners who have zero condo experience suddenly being the renters of a multi hundred thousand dollar valued condo. When the power came on, we discovered that three of the light switches were totally dead, as well as one light fixture. Two maintenance guys in the building, wearing official polo shirts of the building, spent a couple hours in here replacing them, but then they needed to be paid. Christine thought that would be covered by our rental (and I’m sure Rosalind will reimburse us) but we all had to explain that condos operate totally differently from apartment rentals; every wire and pipe that crosses the wall into “our condo” becomes “our problem” and not that of the building folks.

The internet gets set up tomorrow (hopefully) by Cable Onda. Christine really wanted some local cable channels, and there’s no over-the-air broadcasts here, but we got a pretty good package deal of 30Mb/s + 200 channels (more than I’ll ever need to watch!) for $58 a month, which even includes the $4 modem rental. Thankfully though, Claro mobile doesn’t block me from tethering, which is how I’m delivering this blog entry to you.

More pictures soon, once our internet gets installed! Super tired at the moment; just cooked Christine her first nice dinner while she’s hard at working building a presentation to take to Santiago, Panama next week for a three hour long seminar. I’m so proud of her!

It’s an even better view at night!

On a pedestrian overpass, on our way to find SIM cards

Christine and I didn’t spend 3 of our limited checked baggage pounds on our favorite coffee, Highlander Grog, for nothing. After being awakened at 10am by the director of her university knocking on the AirBnB’s door, excited to meet her and handing her a business card and saying “we thought you’d be at our meeting today but then we realized that we had the date wrong!” (she was embarrassed to still be in her pajamas; she had no idea when we answered the door it would be the director), we decided that we needed to wake up, ASAP.

The AirBnB unfortunately didn’t have any kind of regular coffee, just instant coffee and what looked like some kind of fishing net filter that you’d pour stuff through. It was a several hour adventure and discovery of Panama’s chain stores (first Conway, then Doit Center, and lastly Oca Loca – the latter’s mascot is a crazy duck!) before we could hunt down a coffee grinder. Seriously, they had corn grinders that mount on your tabletop at Doit Center, but only Oca Loca had 4 coffee grinders left, hidden in the corner. After two hours of searching, I was overjoyed that the whole-bean coffee could be ground and we could finally have a couple cups. The drip-coffee machine was much easier; all three stores had those for sale.

How can Panama want more corn grinders, than coffee grinders?

Then it was SIM cards and metro cards. The previous night I had thought that maybe Movistar would be the best bet, but then unfortunately after Christine had already taken the plunge and purchased a 1GB plan we discovered that she wouldn’t have 4G LTE, only the decade-old 3G standard. My bad; she had trusted me to do the research. Turns out that other websites have done the research for me; I dropped in the nation of Panama and my phone’s model into their forms, and bingo, it looked like the Claro network would work for both of us! Thanks, FrequencyCheck! Another 30-45 minutes of standing in queues and me trying to talk garbled Spanish-tech-talk, and I had what I felt was a pretty great deal: 4GB of data and 150 minutes for a mere 15 dollars. Compared to my old USA T-Mobile plan of 5GB of data for $30 a month, I was content. Christine decided that she’d eat the $16 she’d already spent at Movistar and got the same Claro plan, too. Oh well.

According to Kary’s ice cream making employees, only a couple metro stations in the entire city sold metro cards. Thankfully one of them had a spare that we could share to get over to Albrook Station on the west end of the single Panama City metro line, where we could spend $2 apiece to get brand new cards and load them up. The public transit systems in Panama seem to be quite cheap; buses are 25 cents a ride and the metro/subway is 35 cents. No transfers though; Christine’s going to need to pay 60 cents each way to get to and from work.

Unfortunately, we’ve learned over the past couple days that food is one of the most expensive things in Panama City. We’ve had time now to wander the streets and see what restaurants are charging; it seems it’s basically impossible to get an entree for less than $7-10 at almost every restaurant. Mentally, I had been assuming and expecting that the prices would be closer to Amman, Jordan’s prices, where I could get a schwarma for a dollar – and did, frequently. Apparently the combination of massive amounts of USA tourism and the flood of Venezuelan economic refugees means that prices have just exploded in the past couple of years.

We’ve learned that lunch is the possible “cheap” meal of the day; we’ll be on the lookout for something called “Executive Lunch” (which I had seen immediately but not paid attention to because the name made me think it would be the opposite of cheap). Basically, the culture and prices of the city cause most local Panamanians to eat home-cooked meals for breakfast and dinner. But – thousands of low-income locals need to work in the richest and highest priced parts of the city every day. The solution is the Executive Lunch, which tends to be a daily special that runs $4-6. Until I can find a job of some kind, I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for those… and cooking for us a lot. Still haven’t been to a grocery store though.

We also got Oreo the pit bull a new toy, which he loves.

He growled, spun around, and wagged his tail furiously. Sorry boy, but the floor doesn’t give you much traction!

Suprise – I’m an expat again. Christine and I have moved to Panama for the next ten months as she takes on a short-term contract as a teaching coordinator and aid to UDELAS university in Panama City. Right now, at almost 2am in the morning, we’re at our AirBnB that we’ll be staying at for the next couple of weeks as we search for housing.

Originally we were going to fly from Milwaukee, to Houston, to Panama City (or PC as I’ll call it a lot of the time) but Hurricane Harvey has put an end to that for the time being. Instead, United changed our flight to a Newark, NJ (without asking, ha) the day before our flight. Same as our trip to Tanzania this past January, we checked out Newark airport’s priority pass lounge, the “Art and Lounge” which was apparently partnered with El Al, Israel’s airline – or at least that’s what it seemed like, judging by the fact that 50% of the patrons were wearing yarmulkes and there were massive signs all over various parts of the food areas with “KOSHER AREA” and “NOT KOSHER FOOD!!”

The flight from Newark to PC was about 5 hours long, sadly without any sort of free media options. We had hoped they’d have those sweet Android tablets like a lot of international flights have, but I guess Central America doesn’t warrant that kind of infrastructure investment – yet!

In the airport, there was almost a problem when the immigration officers refused to accept our AirBnB address, even when we showed them the exact location on Google Maps (thankfully, cached on our internet-less phones ahead of time). Apparently it didn’t fit into their database system and finally, they just gave up, muttered something, and waved us through after taking our fingerprints. A friendly aid from UDELAS, Julio, was waiting for us on the other side of the gate and a short 30 minute car ride later, we were at the AirBnB.

Our hostess, Cary, seems awesome. She’s younger than we are and already has opened an ice cream business in PC and is expanding out to Bocas del Toro on the far west side of the country. She just really loves ice cream – has a tattoo of a cone with an artfully styled scoop in it on her arm! She’s invited us to come stay with her at a just-starting-out SCUBA resort her friend owns for free, in exchange for our reviews and feedback. So far so good!

Also, she has a huge, adorable 3 year old pit bull named Oreo who loves attention. This may have (read: definitely did) played a role in Christine’s choosing Cary’s place.

Tomorrow, it’s time to hunt down SIM cards for our phones and get some health insurance for me. And a yellow fever shot!

Happier times, the day I bought her.

I play it back in my head and wondered the “what ifs” but in the end, it’s no one’s fault but the deer. I had been at my parents’ house in Brodhead the evening of Friday, May 12th, for a pre-Mothers Day dinner, but I had wanted to get to Wauwatosa for the weekend. So, I opted for a midnight drive from Brodhead to Tosa, something I’ve done many times before. It had been a beautiful afternoon and I drove from Madison to Brodhead with the music blaring and the T-Tops off. I took my mom to dinner in the Camaro (dad drove mom’s car separately since she was on call for the clinic, and the Camaro is so low to the ground that tall folks like my dad have trouble getting into it) and had a great evening.

70 miles an hour is the new speed limit on most Wisconsin highways now, and that’s exactly what I was doing at 12:38AM outside of East Troy, Wisconsin, in the rightmost lane of the 4 lane median-divided highway. The deer caught the car directly on the drivers side headlight with a muffled WHUMP, smashing the car’s ABS plastic around the wheel down into the wheel itself milliseconds before I could jam on the brakes. Those milliseconds of 3 wheels turning and one wheel stopped was all it took to wrench me around in a sweet 180 degree loop, across the left northbound lane, and then sliding crazily sideways down the graded median into the grass filled ditch that until moments earlier, the fatal deer had been chowing down in.

I switched the car off. I felt fine. No glass was broken at all. The impact hadn’t felt serious at all to me. So I got out, took a deep breath, and went to look at the front of the car.

Deer are apparently harder than I thought

I called the State Farm accident number and told them I’d hit a deer. I was assured that since no one else’s property but my own was involved, I’d only be out the $500 deductible and they’d take care of the rest. Heartened by this, I walked up the slippery, wet slope in my own tire tracks and looked at the deer. It wasn’t moving – not very much blood though. Although I didn’t touch it to check I’m pretty sure it died instantly of having every bone in its neck broken. Poor thing – why’d you have to be eating at 1AM? Why couldn’t you have been in Deer Bed over in the forest, away from the roads?

About five different cars stopped to check on me while I was waiting for the tow truck to arrive. That was gratifying. Two guys with trucks even offered to pull me up out of the ditch but I assured them that I’d rather let the professionals, paid by my insurance company, assess the collision results exactly as they lay. A sheriff stopped by briefly, told me that it wasn’t his jurisdiction and he couldn’t stay, but that he’d radio for a guy who patrolled this area. That sheriff, an Officer Johnson, arrived fifteen minutes later and filled out the accident form (in case State Farm needed an officer’s opinion of the situation) while we waited another fifteen minutes for the tow truck to arrive. Johnson sympathized with me heartily – he was a young looking guy, maybe five years older than me, and he told me that this was the 3rd deer collision in 3 nights he’d seen. “Young pregnant females, they need to eat so much more food than usual, that they go down into the tall grass between the north and southbound roads where all the water flows – and they’re jittery and jumpy because they’re young. Not your fault.”

The tow truck operator, Kyle, and Johnson appraised the front end damage. Both seemed impressed – “huh, a newer car would have crumpled a lot more. These older GM cars; they can take a hit like a champ.” I told them I’d barely even felt the hit; it was like hitting a raccoon. Obviously the impact force was enough to fling me off the road and I could respect that, but the damage still looked a lot worse than it had felt. The deer had essentially liquefied one of my custom headlights I’d installed two summers ago; there wasn’t a single piece of it left except the wires, dangling uselessly like an ocular nerve. And the front “nose” of the car had been mildly damaged and replaced two and a half years ago. I found it ironic that the newest parts of the car were the most visibly damaged.

Kyle pulled the car out of the ditch slowly with his winch cable, and told me that State Farm had authorized him to take the car wherever I wanted at their expense. Nice of them – so I picked Sparkle Auto Body, who had done all the previous body work on the car before. 55 miles away – is that okay? No problem at all, I was told – I’ll deliver it to them right now. Johnson offered to drop me off at a nearby 24-hour Walmart, where Christine could pick me up. I sat on the uncomfortable hard plastic seats of his squad car, watching the yellow flashing lights of the tow truck disappear into the distance. I’d see her again, I told myself. State Farm told me I’d just need to pay that $500 deductible and Sparkle Auto Body does great work; she’d be as good as new – probably better.

Unfortunately….that wouldn’t be the case. When I bicycled over to Sparkle on Monday to see how the car looked in the daylight, they told me there’d be a good chance State Farm would have to declare her a Total Loss. Sparkle was estimating the damages at $6,000 – and 15 year old, 2002 V6 Camaroes just aren’t worth that kind of money, even if replacement parts were easy to find for them – which they are not. Between the obvious damage to 3-4 separate parts of the body that would require complete replacement and repainting, the warned me that the sliding down the hill sideways might have done all kinds of other possible damage to her suspension and frame that wasn’t as easy to see.

The call I’d been expecting but dreading came on Wednesday – a nice valuation on the part of State Farm though; instead of taking the Blue Book value of $1700 for the car, they actually did some research on the prices 2002 Camaroes were selling for in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa, and offered me a check based on that value, which was substantially more. Heck, if I wanted to I could go out to Plymouth, Wisconsin and buy me an identical Camaro the next day, if I wanted! So…props to State Farm for treating a customer right. I don’t hold it against them for Totalling the car; insurance is a numbers game and the numbers just weren’t in her favor. It was close though, from what I found out – if the damage had been only $800-1200 less, it might have been under the red line. But “what ifs” don’t get anyone anywhere. What if I’d decided to just spend the night in Brodhead? What if I’d stopped for coffee at a gas station on the way? ….What if she hadn’t been so well built, and I had died or been seriously injured in the crash, instead of barely feeling the impact? What ifs are pointless to dwell on.

Props also go to Sparkle Auto Body, who put the car up on their lift and quickly removed the aftermarket hitch from the car for free when I asked if they’d help me out. They’ll be removing the license plates for me later today as well. Christine took me over to the Sparkle lot yesterday so I could collect my belongings out of the car and have a few final moments with her. I emptied her out, put the keys in the ignition and started her up one last time, pumping the gas while in park to hear the GMC 3800 engine roar like it did back at the Zimbrick lot in 2012. My first car! God, I loved having her. She improved my life and cheered me up to drive her, and in the end, probably saved my life as her final act. After 15 years of cruising, you deserve a rest.

Just like back in 2012

You’ll see all your old Camaro buddies from the assembly line! Where you can romp and rev…

Today marks ten years since I downloaded and installed WordPress 2.1.3 on my little corner of the internet, mostly to give my parents a means of checking up on me when I took my summer trip to the United Kingdom later in the month of May. My first blog post was the equivalent of “Hello World” and very few people know or remember that very briefly, this blog briefly occupied a /blog subfolder instead of the place of honor at the top of the domain. At that point I thought the website might serve as a repository for a CV and other documents, and I didn’t know if I wanted to commit to what I thought of as a bland, boring “every page on the internet is a damned wordpress blog!” look. It would be a year before I’d scrap that original, now forgotten, look and commit wholly to WordPress.

The blog served me well for my two years of living in Jordan, and it definitely doesn’t get updated as much anymore (except for navel-gazing, like to celebrate having basic web security or to commemorate a decade of its own existence, geez that’s corny), but perhaps I’ll have some exciting news to share next week.

It’s hard to believe HeiseHeise.com has been on the Internet since May 2007 – I know, I have the bills from 1and1.com to prove it! Hard to believe I’ve been going to places like Jordan, China, and India and logging right into the admin page for the website through an HTTP connection – I might as well have been saying to the government-controlled ISP’s I was connecting through “please, take my username and password and store it for your later use!”

I might not have been nearly as technically minded a decade ago as I am now, but for the past half decade or so I’ve been wincing, or connecting to the UW’s VPN service, every time I’d log onto my website. But what else could I do? I only pay 1and1 about $3 a month for the most basic hosting plan I can get; for a long time it’s been essentially impossible to add a TLS certificate (or even the now-outdated SSL) onto shared hosting unless I had my own IP address, and no way in heck was going to pay that kind of money for a website which is basically one step above a public diary.

However, in September 2016 1and1 apparently relented and allowed all their hosting plans access to a free Symantec certificate (using SNI, a relatively new technology that allows shared sites to be able to use certificates), good for one domain (no subdomains). Thanks to this thread for showing me that while 1and1 wasn’t willing to allow 3rd party certificates on their servers (like the well known and amazing LetsEncrypt service), the final post on that page clued me into this new generosity. So yesterday, I pushed two buttons in the 1and1 admin panel to generate the new cert, then went into WordPress’s settings here on this site to change my URL from HTTP to HTTPS. Then….the site went down for the next 3-4 hours or so. Whoops. I mean, I wasn’t alarmed yet – I know it takes awhile for hosted websites to do stuff sometimes. I figured there was some sort of delay in linking the new Symantec certificate into my domain, or changing my shared hosting location from an HTTP section of 1and1 server’s to an HTTPS server (I noticed my IP address changed this morning). Then, it was a few modifications to my .htaccess file to permanently 301 redirect http://heiseheise.com to https://heiseheise.com (so from now on, you shouldn’t need to update your bookmarks; all visits to the unencrypted site will redirect here to the encrypted version) and that was that. My website gets an A rating from SSLlabs.com, and also points out that people visiting me from Internet Explorer on Windows XP won’t be able to see the website at all now (due to a lack of the aforementioned SNI technology). Good! Stop using Windows XP, people. Ugh.

But Zach, why am I still not seeing the green padlock on this site? Firefox shows me a padlock with a yellow exclamation point, and Chrome shows a circle with an “i” in it. Good question. It’s probably a combination of the plugins I use that might not support HTTPS yet, combined with the fact that all my actual blog entries until now are using HTTP for linking to the photos I host. I was hoping the htaccess modification would automatically rewrite the code on the fly but it looks like that’s too much to hope for. Perhaps I’ll go back and change the links in the blog entries to go to https, but considering that when you actually do click on the pictures they take you to the HTTPS version, I’m not overly worried. And besides, the main thing is that the admin pages of WordPress are now 100% secure (check out https://heiseheise.com/blog/wp-admin to see the green padlock we all know and love) so I’m no longer worried about my credentials getting hoovered up by any governments or ISP’s I might have to interact with over the course of my travels. Time to change those passwords, by the way!